Is Nature Ever Evil?: Religion, Science and Value by Willem B. Drees
By Willem B. Drees
Can nature be evil, or grotesque, or unsuitable? will we practice ethical price to nature?From a compellingly unique premise, less than the auspices of significant thinkers together with Mary Midgley, Philip Hefner, Arnold Benz and Keith Ward, Is Nature Ever Evil? examines the value-structure of our cosmos and of the technological know-how that seeks to explain it. technological know-how, says editor Willem B. Drees, claims to depart ethical inquiries to aesthetic and spiritual concept. however the intended neutrality of the medical view mask a bunch of ethical assumptions. How does an ethically obvious technology arrive at innovations of a 'hostile' universe or a 'selfish' gene? How do botanists, zoologists, cosmologists and geologists reply to the great thing about the universe they learn, reliant because it is upon disaster, savagery, strength and extinction? Then there are lots of ways that technology seeks to change and increase nature. What do prosthetics and gene know-how, cyborgs and dairy cows say approximately our appreciation of nature itself? absolutely technological know-how, in universal with philosophy, magic and faith, can relief our knowing of evil in nature - even if as average catasrophe, sickness, predatory cruelty or mere cosmic indifference?Focusing at the moral evaluate of nature itself, Is Nature Ever Evil? re-ignites the most important questions of wish, accountability, and danger in nature.
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Extra info for Is Nature Ever Evil?: Religion, Science and Value
Sample text
Since we are deeply social beings, our emotional attitudes always tend to take a personal form, even when they are not actually focused on our fellow human beings. We have just seen how this has happened in the case of the theorists that I have been discussing. And awe, respect and gratitude are attitudes that do naturally seem to demand some kind of a personal object. Obviously, this is one great source of religion. But in the various religions, personification plays very varying parts. Buddhism and Taoism play it down.
There is no way in which we humans can resolve the difficulty of finding an appropriate emotional attitude to the cosmos that we live in by simply refusing to have any such emotional attitude. We cannot – as he wished – take up a relation to the entire world around us which is purely cognitive, treating it quite dispassionately, merely as an object of enquiry. We cannot do this because we ourselves are part of it. We are not pure intellects but vulnerable, dependent creatures deeply involved in that world.
In the 1970s, after Monod published his book, another view about the cosmos appeared which would certainly have furnished him with a suitable target for his attacks, had he known about it. This view is relevant to our theme because, while it differs radically from those that we have just considered, it, like them, has been put forward as carrying a scientific seal of approval. It is the view that the universe does indeed have a central purpose, namely, the exaltation of man. This idea is currently expressed in scientific terms in the Strong Anthropic Principle, which regards the perfection of Intelligent Life (that is, of us and our successors, some of whom will be machines) as the ruling aim of the whole cosmos.